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Comment by redthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Lowe's articles have the delightful quality of bringing in people who don't understand the chemistry, and making them feel like they're part of something.

I never got into o-chem, and I certainly don't know anything about excited groups that want to blow off some steam and relax. But I can read Lowe's posts and feel like I'm in on the joke, and that's pretty rewarding in and of itself.

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Explosions and threats of explosions bring many kids (middle/high school/freshmen) into it.

If you have money, this is nice for the younger ones: https://melscience.com/

Or one of the numerous chemistry sets available- preferably something with a lot of chemicals that are unsafe. I personally almost killed myself mixing things when I was an adolescent.

And in the 80s there was this: https://archive.org/details/Chem_Lab_1985-Simon_and_Schuster...

If kids aren't interested in chemistry, it's that the teacher/cirriculum/resources available to the students is just piss poor... and unfortunately that is the norm. It's so easy to keep kids engaged if you continue doing experiments that astound.

> Explosions and threats of explosions bring many kids (middle/high school/freshmen) into it.

That was exactly why I was a chemistry nerd in high school and almost made a career out of it. Veered off in a different direction ultimately, but I still have what are to me fond memories (not so fond for everyone else around me subjected to "side effects" from the "experiments").

Still not clear how I avoided getting thrown in prison for all the crazy stuff. I'd be terrified if my kids attempted the same things.

His "Things I Won't Work With" series is absolutely delightful. Strongly recommended to everyone.

http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/category/thing...

That (and a touch of Breaking Bad) did that for me. Added chemist to the list of "things I could have done in an alternate universe".

Anyone who liked this should Google for more ("Things I won't work with" is a good search term).

As well as the 'things that blow up' category he writes delightfully on 'things that smell bad' and 'things that can kill you in miscellaneous ways'.

To be honest, the talking about explosions turned me off.

Surely there are more interesting topics to get somebody excited about chemistry?

This concept of "more interesting than explosions" confuses me greatly.

It's like trying to make somebody enthusiastic about computer science by having a long monologue about the wonders of the "rm -rf" command.

A lot of my enthusiasm came from things like Core Wars and abusing C to crash my computer by overwriting code (hooray for old systems with no memory protection), so, yeah.

It sometimes depresses me a little that on the best ways I know to 'impress' (but only barely) friends of mine with my line of work is to do a 3D css transform/transition on whatever website they're currently looking at...

Thankfully there's been the occasional friend who got really excited at the thought of being able to use their browser's devtools to change things on the page through css or javascript.

Maybe you could impress them by showing how you can use devtools to forge a tweet or bank balance or boarding pass.

That's actually a good point. I should probably find some 'party tricks' to reel in all the people around me who are vaguely interested in or curious about programming.

Edit: because 'hey look how I just told react to re-render the ENTIRE page and it only updated that one div' impresses nobody.

That's also a great way of teaching people how websites/servers/browsers work. They're not looking at "the actual" webpage on their computer, just an instance of it that their browser downloaded onto their own computer.

They can mess with it all they want, they're not really changing anything.

Teaching people this is also a great lesson in "screenshots of a webpage do not prove anything was actually written". More than once, I've found myself explaining that yes, that picture looks very convincing and has the right background image, but it's still totally fake text.

This is what I show kids at the youth centre I work. A more innocent version obviously, like changing the text below the Google logo. They can figure out the potential nefarious uses themselves :p

This is for the ones that did't really came to learn but thought they could fire up a gaming website or facebook. Something to keep their attention instead of just saying "no, not allowed".

I really like that CSS transition/rotation trick, made a note of it, because it seems like a perfect step up after you've gotten the concept of being able to change text.

If anyone knows more of these simple "party tricks", please do post them here :-)

Another one I like, surprisingly popular among the younger kids (7-9 or thereabouts), are the two linux command line tools "sl" and "cowsay". Two characters to display an ASCII steam locomotive in that weird black hackers rectangle? Yeah! Those two are actually super-educational, because they're not installed by default on most systems so you quickly explain/show them you need to "sudo apt install" them first (tell them "apt is kind of like the app-store and sudo means you want to do it as the super-user", not entirely correct but good enough for now). The more clever kids actually remember this and next time they want to show another kid, they partially remember they needed to do something with that apt install line (and then ask me what it was again, exactly).

If you're even vaguely musically inclined, having some form of livecoding environment set up that you can play with might be interesting to people.

Why do you add "long monologue" to your counter example? I don't think adding that modifier is a fair equivalence.

And I'll add a counter-point: rm -rf stories, things like piping /dev/random to speakers or the first time I accidentally did the equivalent of whiel(1) fork(); were an integral part of my early appreciation and enjoyment of computers. I'd argue they are fairly analogous to things blowing up in chemistry.

I always found piping other devices into the speakers a bit more interesting. Mostly noise, but just enough order to occasionally give interesting bits and pieces for your brain to catch on and try to parse.

There are people who will run rm -rf / on a box they're in the process of decommissioning it to see what stuff breaks when. Was a bit more fun in the good ol' days when more stuff was statically linked, but it's always bound to give a few surprises, like when running it on certain UEFI systems [1].

[1] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=UEFI-rm-r...

My pick for the most interesting chemical that he's described does not explode, but rather convinces things to light on fire.

http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2008/02/26/san...

There are many interesting reaction results:

   - Colors
   - Lights
   - Precipitates
   - Temperatures
   - Voltages and currents
   - Crystal formation
   - Smells
   - Tastes (for certain safe reactions)
   - Compounds with interesting applications
   - And, of course, explosions

And some of these are certainly explored in many chemistry introductions.

But I have to disagree, of these many interesting reactions, none is more interesting or exciting than an explosion.

Explosions also combine several of these.

One of my old chem profs would flick little bits of dry NI3 into the lecture hall once per year.

It makes a sharp popping sound and leaves a slowly-disappearing stain, and won't kill your students.

> Explosions also combine several of these.

Pretty much all of them actually, in some ways.

But it's always a bad sign when you're experiencing various tastes as a result of an explosion.

On which note, Lowe's piece on ClF3 is a great example of explosions producing lots of different experiences. It contains one of my all-time favorite sentences:

> It’s bad enough when your reagent ignites wet sand, but the clouds of hot hydrofluoric acid are your special door prize if you’re foolhardy enough to hang around and watch the fireworks.

http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2008/02/26/san...

Well, there's also drugs, but most people are skittish about bringing that up in a high school setting.

That's what I was thinking, I don't quite know about "nito-groups" other then it has nitogen in it, but I get the feeling it blows up a lot, and that's good enough for me (to read about, not acually try this)

In chemical terms, nitro groups are -NO₂, which puts the nitrogen atom (which usually wants to attract electrons) at the oxidation state of +5. This makes nitro groups likely to be explosive, since nitrogen wants to return to a more neutral oxidation state (more specifically, elemental nitrogen, N₂ with its very stable triple bond), and will tend to do so exothermically and rapidly.

The desire to return N₂ quickly also makes N-N and N=N single and double bonds very likely to make compounds explosive, because those bonds are already well on their way in the quest for stability and will happily release lots of heat as they do so. See the hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane mentioned in the article--it's full of -N-NO₂ groups! And, naturally, it blows up.

My thanks :D

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